Predictive Analytics: Saving Zebras and Other Feats

Marwell Wildlife is using predictive analytics software to help save endangered zebras in Africa. Such in-depth, pattern-recognition analysis can be applied to any business improvement, whether your "customers" happen to be wildlife, or humans.

For example, Parker says, the software helped determine the factors that drive the local population's attitudes towards wildlife. "We used SPSS to predict what influences people's attitudes, whether that was education level, people's age, what their tribal background is, whether they'd had contact with conservation before, whether they got benefits from wildlife - a whole range of different things," he says.

Looking forward, Parker says the organization plans to continue working with IBM to further analyze the data collected. "We'd like to overlay remote sensing data, radio tracking data and aerial survey data, and combine all our information - so we'll be looking to team with IBM to work out how to... feed all these different types of information into our analysis," he says.